Bruno Mangyoku
IT WAS the wreckage of yet another TV that finally convinced one man to seek help. Psychologist Antonio Zadra remembers the patient well. “When we asked what brought him in, he said, ‘Well, that’s the third TV set that I threw at an intruder who isn’t there. It’s getting damn expensive.'”
Zadra, who studies sleepwalking at the University of Montreal, is interested in why anyone would do things like this in their sleep. And it turns out that the answer is important to all of us.
You might think that when you close your eyes and drift off, your body basically shuts down, and dreams then play out in your head. Due to the inhibition of muscle movement, or muscle atonia, that normally occurs during dreaming sleep, most of us don’t act out our dreams or have one-sided conversations. Just 1 per cent of people sleepwalk regularly. But three-quarters of us will talk in our sleep and a third of us will sleepwalk at some point. And we all occasionally shift position or mumble. Now we are learning that even the seemingly subtle twitches and murmurs we make actually have a surprisingly important impact.
Work by Zadra and others is revealing that our bodies play a far more active role in what happens during sleep than people generally think – and not just for sleepwalkers or people chucking appliances at the wall. Their findings suggest that movements in our dreaming minds, or sleeping bodies, serve a far more fundamental purpose, one that shapes how we move and talk in our waking lives.
Despite spending roughly a third of our lives in…
